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Using your favorite keyword research tool, can you find 450 long-tail keywords that are relevant for your site and/or the content on those 450 pages? Can you use each keyword in part of the content for each page? If so, you have a good opportunity to grab some long-tail keyword queries for your site by optimizing those pages (use the keyword as the title, and then again within the page a few times).

It's worth paying an intern or something to do it for 30+ hours, that's for sure. This is a MUST in SEO. You do not want duplicate title tags. If they appear in Google Webmaster Tools under the HTML suggestions, well, if Google suggests you do something, I think it would be extremely beneficial to do it. I would definitely take whatever time necessary to get new, unique titles to each page. IF that means hiring it out so you don't have to spend all that time then great.

on-page factors (like page title) are 20% of the ranking equation. off-page (external links from relevant sites with appropriate anchor text) are 80%. Still, if it's easy to do the on-page stuff then why not? Maybe some of the 450 long tail phrases you come up with are not competitive and merely changing the title tag could help you rank. That's possible. But more likely you'll need to (1) change the title tags to be unique long-tail phrases, (2) add the same phrase to the body of the page a couple of times, and (3) get at least 1 external link from a relevant site with appropriate anchor text to each of the 450 pages.

There is nothing saying that you have to do it for all 450 pages or none immediately. Use your analytics package to find out which are the most important pages and use Googles keyword tool to get estimated search volumes for the key terms and you can get a hit list of the 10, 20, 50 or even 100 pages that you may see most benefit from by doing this extra work.

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